Lately, I realized it might make a good illustration of my thinking as a taxonomist of the arts. Its place in the arts as a mathematical poem would be accepted by most people without much hesitation. Indeed, so far as I can tell, it has. Some who have thought long and hard about exactly what poetry is, though, have denied that it, and similar works, are poems. As one who strives for rigorous definitions myself, I respect their view--although I contend that it is wrong.

As a taxonomist, my first question regarding this piece is what's in it? Answer: words and mathematical symbols indicating a mathematical operation. Hence, for me, it must be one of three things: some kind of mathematical work, some kind of verbal work, or some kind of synthesis of the two. I should note that there are those who would term it a visual poem--because it looks different from normal poems, and you have to see it on the page fully to understand it. I reject this reasoning on the grounds that a visual poem should give one experiencing it a significant amount of visual pleasure, and I can't see that being the case here. The visual elements involved tell the person experiencing the work how to experience it rather than presenting an aesthetic experience for him to appreciate. Admittedly, this can only be ascertained subjectively, but to me it seems an easy matter in this case (and most cases)--that is, something a consensus of informed judges would quickly agree to. (The work can also be presented orally, although that would cost it much of its punch.)

So, next question: is it a mathematical work? No. Clearly, it has no mathematical terms; it carries out a mathematical operation, but the answer it leads to is far from mathematically inevitable. Is it, then, a verbal work? Well, it seems to me that it is decisively more verbal than anything else. If you remove its words, nothing is left but an empty mathematical framework signifying just about nothing. If, on the other hand, you remove the mathematical apparatus from it, you still have a meaningful set of words.

Should we call it a verbal work, then? Not necessarily, for it might be wiser to call it neither mathematical nor verbal--a "mathaesthetem," or "work of mathaesthetry-- composed by a mathaesthet," say. Sorry, as a taxonomist, I would have to say no--even if someone came up with much better terminology. As a taxonomist, I believe a category-- in this case, a phylum (in my taxonomy) under the kingdom, Art--ought to cover roughly as much territory as each other category at its level, and/or cover matter decisively different from the matter covered by those other categories. If I accepted "mathaesthetry" as a phylum sharing a level with literature, illumagery (as I call visual art), and music, it would be sort of like making a special category for whales and dolphins between fish and mammals. It would also go against my assigning regular drama to literature (because its verbal elements seem to me more important than its visual elements) opera, a pluraesthetic art like my work, to music (because I consider its music aesthetically more important than its words and visual elements), musical drama to literature (because its music and visual elements seem less important than its words), architecture to illumagery (because its visual elements seem to me more important than its technological or engineering elements), and the dance to illumagery (because its visual elements seem to me more important than its dramatic elements--which are, in any case, non-verbal). It would go against the similar practices of conventional (mostly implicit) taxonomies, too-- except, I believe, in the case of the dance, which I really haven't thought deeply about what to do with.

In short, it seems most sensible to call my mathemaku a work of literature. But what kind of literature? There are two choices in my taxonomy (and most others that I know of): poetry and prose. Of course, I could create a third, mathaesthetry, but won't, for the same reason I didn't think mathaesthetry an appropriate phylum under Art. So, it's poetry or prose. It's difficult to determine which it is because there is no universally-accepted definition of "poetry." It is unarguably not poetry if one defines poetry as metrical verse only, as some do. Such a definition is taxonomically indefensible, however, for the same reason a separate category, at any level in a system of classification, for mathaesthetry would be--if we take everything that has distinguished poetry from prose for millenia.

It is true that most poetry in English (which is all I'm concerned with here) until this century differed from prose in its emphasis on auditory effects: patterned rhythms and repeated sounds. If we raise our investigation of what poetry has been to a higher level of generalization, I believe it legitimate to say that it has been words used to maximize the fundaceptual pleasure the person experiencing them gets from the subject of those words. By "fundaceptual pleasure," I mean sensory and/or endocrinal and/or muscular pleasure.

Wait. I'm speaking of poetry as art, not as propaganda or information, for I'm writing about a taxonomy of art, here. I see that I am also speaking of lyrical poetry, thus neglecting narrative poetry. That makes sense to me because, if my mathemaku is any kind of poetry, it is lyrical poetry. So, what counts in lyrical poetry is fundaceptual pleasure, mainly visual and auditory pleasure, but also the visceral or endocrinological pleasure of simple serenity, or of sexual health, or the physiological pleasure of making a great shot in tennis, and so forth.

One important way a lyric poem can cause fundaceptual pleasure is through the patterned rhythms and repeated sounds already mentioned. But that is far from the only way it can do this, and is not the most important way. Presentation of imagery vividly and freshly is a second way that I believe most poetry-lovers would agree is as valuable as meter and rhyme in lyrica poetry. Metaphor, as Aristotle declared, is the greatest element of the best poetry, however--for it presents what one might call layered imagery. It results in putting a person experiencing it into what I call Manywhere-at-Once. Two or more previously unconnected, important parts, of one's brain. Take Shakespeare's winter boughs as "bare ruined choirs" (Sonnet 73)--when one first encounters these, one is transported to a place in one's brain that holds memories of winter woods and--at the same time--to a place in one's brain that holds a memory of an empty choir in a church. One will also experience a memory in a third separate place of what being old means to one, because the poem associates the boughs with its speaker's time of life.

Another difference between poetry and prose is utilitarian: devices in poetry to slow a person's experience of it, so as to give him extra time fully to appreciate the fundaceptual pleasure it should result in. Hence, the lineation all poems up to recently have had in print (and, I believe, when spoken)--and other, later forms of what I call "flow-breaks," such as unexpected indentations and white space somewhere in the middle of lines.

Poems, too, have always tended to be more artificial and/or riskily unconventional in language than prose--to accentuate their being poems and thus texts that require a different kind of attention than prose, as well as simply to shock the person experiencing a poem into greater alertness. Related to this is poetry's generally trying much more to seem freshly worded than prose (because words have always counted more in poetry than in prose, which is concerned much more than poetry in what the words are about). Richly connotative words, I might add, are a staple of poetry, not prose, which tends to have narrower aims.

To sum up, I claim that poetry through the ages has differed from prose in its emphasis on eight elements: (1) meter, (2) repetition of sounds, (3) imagery, (4) figurative language, (5) lineation or other flow-breaks, (6) artificial language, (7) fresh language, (8) connotativeness. While it is true that the first of these has been a hallmark of poetry in English for centuries, and that almost nothing called poetry in English did not have it, written poetry, was always lineated, too, (literary) prose never. Hence, when free verse came about, and the question of whether it was poetry or prose arose, one could say it was not because it was unmetrical--or one could say it was because it was lineated. The fact that it used repetition of sounds the way traditional poetry did rather than as prose did, focused on imagery, figurative language and connotativeness far more than normal prose did (and often more than traditional poetry did), and (eventually) came to use language much more freshly than most traditional poems did, makes it hard for me to understand why anyone would classify it as prose rather than poetry. Moreover, everything that experimental free verse has added to its composers' tool kit (e.g., visual and infra-verbal devices, the jump-cut, new ways of performing poems, averbal sound effects) has been in the service of maximizing fundaceptual pleasure. What did it do to the degree that prose did, besides mostly avoid artificial language, and meter? And how can something that looks like poetry on a page, and tends to emphasize just about everything that traditional poetry emphasized and little that prose has seriously be considered prose?

Obviously, I am arguing that my mathemaku be considered poetry. It is a veritable metaphor machine, compelling one who understands its simple operation to take the multiplication of the the term, "woods," by the term, "rain," as a metaphor for spring, as is the addition of the term, "robins" to the term, "green." I can't see that the work tries to do anything but maximize the fundaceptual pleasure of its restatement (in fresh language) of the truism that rain makes vegetation create leaves in spring. I wouldn't call it lineated, though it looks like it is, but it is full of flow-breaks. Where does it act like prose (except in its extremely commonplace language)? Is it possible to find a passage in any text everyone agrees is prose that is similar to it? In short, if it is not poetry, what is it?

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